The Salt Pillar and the Sugar Cane
by brighteyes31
Summary: When he first looked at her and grinned, her innards turned into a warm thick caramel and ran together down her ribcage. She felt delicious and petrified inside.


This was a piece written for a creative writing class I'm currently taking. The type of piece is called a "flash fiction," which is a very short bit of prose that is supposed to either reveal an important twist at the very end or describe a burst of feeling or emotion. Basically, you have to tell an entire story in a very limited amount of space. The relationship between the Joker and Harley Quinn influenced this almost 100 percent, although I added a couple of my own details. I didn't intend for it to be a fanfiction, but I could definitely see how it is one; so, needless to say, enjoy!

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**The Salt Pillar and the Sugar Cane**

When he first looked at her and grinned, her innards turned into a warm thick caramel and ran together down her ribcage. She felt delicious and petrified inside.

His face, intolerably long, turned toward her, much faster than she would have allowed. She saw the aquiline nose, then the ivory cheekbone, then the curling lips that rendered her silently choking. They moved, deliberately, nastily, lovingly, into a smile and then parted and showed her a magnificent yellowed crossbite. She had never seen a human with a crossbite before. She never realized until then that she had always wanted to.

He began talking and she listened. She had to. He talked and talked, saliva slicking his inside bottom lip, his voice causing the room to swell and press against its bars. He asked her many, many questions, but she could never answer correctly or well. Because of this, he laughed whenever something escaped her mouth.

His laugh, a bark of squealing joy, entered her body and echoed and bounced off the caramel still stuck to her ribcage. She wanted to laugh too, but his cackling punctured the process. All she could manage was a sweat-soaked chuckle next to his peals of absolute mirth.

She knew that she could not turn around nor could she start over again after his laughter consumed her. She had left. She would become a pillar of salt if she made that fatal turn over her shoulder. But she needn't worry about becoming that white pillar, because she could not have looked back even if she so boldly, so lustily wanted to.

She became obsessed with his skin, bloodless textile turned white as his maker stretched it to cover his bones; she examined his toothpick limbs, moving with a humorous creak whenever he shifted to rotate an ankle or extend a forearm past the elbow; she bathed in his voice, the deep swagger of his syllables, and found herself sympathizing.

Yes, she sympathized. He told her vague, blackened-heart stories of child abuse, broken homes, barren betrayal. She knew each one must be fabricated but she rubbed that fabric between the fingers of her mind and wore it like a wedding gown.

And as her fascination with his character grew, so grew an ulterior fascination that she would hasten to avoid explaining if she ever had to explain.

She would continue to watch him, but this time from various positions in the mirages of her mind. His body looked like sugar cane stripped of its black coating. She wanted to taste his sweetness.

Oftentimes he would only gaze at her, the veins in his eyes prominent, and a corner of his mouth would rise as if he expected her to say something of comedy. She would fumble with the words he expected because in one dreamy flash, she would see him as the sugar cane she wanted to suck on.

In one dreamy flash, she would picture, in the vast black expanses of her mind, the claim, the consummation; he would rock her like an infant's cradle, fingernails forming thin red half-moons in her back that would trickle with terrified life, whispering genocidal threats into her ear canal, gentle and jagged, at the same time brushing the crest of her ear with his animal teeth; and a quaking from the depths of her being would begin, rolling inside her body and forcing her to snap her thighs together for fear of doing something rash.

She did not understand why her body throbbed in certain places for him. She thought she should tell herself to avoid something like that, but the notion of avoidance didn't even cross her mind when it was occupied with images of sugar cane without coating and dried caramel clinging to ribcages.

So as he lounged, a slippered foot twitching, a laugh recoiling off padded walls, a heart beating without blood, and mused aloud whether or not they would come to bind his arms across his body _again_ today, she knew that becoming a pillar of salt was no longer an option.

It never was. This was bound to happen.

As he spellbounded her like he usually did, this time with his white spider of a hand fiendishly, tenderly proffered in her direction, her mind traveled to distant lands with him and flashed again to the consummation. The bodily aching commenced, and pressing with her thighs, she laid her palm into his. It was hot with cruelty and curiosity.

She knew that he knew that her clipboard and white coat meant nothing.

She wanted to hear the voices in his head.

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Thanks for reading! I love feedback and comments, so feel free to tell me anything.


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